San Antonio Review

11/25/2025

“They have no name except a secret kept by sage and cactus.”

In "Taos Trees," Sara Eddy captures the strangeness and beauty of the high desert — where trees become dancers, names fall away, and the land itself does the talking. A poem about wonder, perception, and the way certain landscapes remake us simply by being seen.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where place becomes poetry.

11/23/2025

“I loved that body… as I love you now.”

In Trans Mom, Sara Eddy writes with tenderness and clarity about love that adapts, deepens, and refuses to be confined by the past. This poem honors transformation not as loss, but as an expansion — a way of seeing someone more fully, more truthfully, and with unwavering affection.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where love’s language evolves and remains.

11/22/2025

Reading Roundup 2025 part 4: Hey all- more of the stuff I read this year. [Sent with Free Plan]

Hey all- more of the stuff I read this year.

11/17/2025

“Sorry and happiness worked on one another to achieve some kind of insipid mean.”

In "Everything At Once," John Grey captures the emotional whiplash of a single day holding both death and birth. Grief and joy collide, language falters, and a poet learns that even he can be left wordless when life pulls in opposite directions at the same time.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where the contradictions of being human find their voice.

11/16/2025

2025 reading part 3: Here’s more of the stuff I read this year! [Sent with Free Plan]

Here’s more of the stuff I read this year!

11/16/2025

“If it weren’t that someone loves me, I’d just be writing boxes freighted to nowhere.”

In "Me As A Cog," John Grey turns the grind of shift work into stark, resonant poetry. A life measured in boxes and hours becomes a meditation on identity, repetition, and the thin thread of love that keeps a person from disappearing into the machinery.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where working-class voices rise and speak their truth.

11/13/2025

“The dead hand” on the ballot, a nation at a crossroads.

In “Dead Hand Gone”, Brian Christopher Jones drops us into a near-future referendum where an obscure law school note, an old prize essay, and a former Supreme Court Justice collide with the question: Should America scrap its Constitution? From campus debates to national upheaval, the story follows Jake as he learns what happens when ideas outrun their author.

Read the full story at sanantonioreview.org — and decide what you’d mark on that ballot.

11/11/2025

“Nobody understands su***de in the same way that nobody understands flight, but we are happy.”

In "No Patterns In Heaven," Jesse Holwitz threads beauty and brutality together — a surreal meditation on connection, decay, and the strange symmetry of existence. From hydrangeas to highways, everything mirrors everything, and meaning flickers like firelight.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where language burns and rebuilds itself.

11/10/2025

“You could have done nothing… but you chose to help them instead.”

In "Octocapitulants," artist and poet David E. Matthews confronts the unsettling ease with which betrayal is cloaked in civility. This piece isn’t just a reckoning — it’s a roll call.

To those who voted against hope, progress, or truth — your names are already written.

Art as indictment. Typography as testimony. Design that doesn’t look away.

11/10/2025

"She stayed at the water’s edge, kissing her own reflection while I drowned in the ripples.”

In "Narcissus," Mecca Miles confronts the devastating reflections of trauma, motherhood, and survival. This poem turns myth inside out — transforming a story of vanity into one of pain, reclamation, and the quiet strength of speaking truth.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where vulnerability becomes power.

11/09/2025

“One act of war or a four act concerto — we closed our eyes to count backwards from zero.”

Steve Sibra’s "THE WATSON TRUMPETEERS" blurs the line between music and war, beauty and brutality. Soldiers become musicians of survival, their horns echoing through jungles, blood, and memory. A haunting symphony of loss, duty, and the fragile rhythm of what remains human.

Read the full poem at sanantonioreview.org — where poetry meets reckoning.